President’s call for ‘hugs, not bullets’ misses mark
Jose Noriel Portillo started his deadly rampage by shooting dead a baseball player who helped defeat the team he sponsors. He then set fire to the house of another.
After that, he got into an argument with a local tour guide, chased him into the San Francisco Javier church in Cerocahui and allegedly shot him dead. He then reportedly turned his weapon on two priests who offered the tour guide refuge. The altar is now riddled with bullet holes and splattered with blood.
As shocking as the killings were, bringing condemnation from the Pope and the United Nations, they are more or less routine in increasingly lawless Mexico. A leading local priest, Reverand Javier Avila, during the homily at the small church where the killings took place, lashed out at Mexican President Andrs Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Lopez Obrador has employed a radical approach to the relentless wave of cartel violence in his country: “Abrazos, no balazos.”
“Hugs, not bullets” is the idea that poverty reduction and social programmes can substitute the war on drugs. And it is failing.
“The hugs are no longer enough to
cover the bullets,” said Avila. “It seemed that the priests were untouchable, but we are not,” he said.
Halfway into Lopez Obrador’s sixyear term, the number of murders — which stands at nearly 124,000 — has surpassed those during the presidency of former president Felipe Calderon.
But Mexico’s difficulties extend much further than public security; the economy is collapsing and the country is suffering a major exodus, something Lopez Obrador said he will raise with United States President Joe Biden when he visits the White House next week.
Lopez Obrador came to power with lofty ambitions to reboot the economy and put the poorest first. Telegraph Group Ltd